Integrated circuit (“IC”) designs are becoming more complicated over time. Power consumption and yield limit the production of complex integrated circuits designs. To address power consumption limitations, some integrated circuit designs use voltage islands. Voltage islands are individually controllable power regions. By placing elements of an integrated circuit in different voltage islands, the integrated circuit can selectively operate elements in one or more of the voltage islands at a lower voltage and/or power-off the elements when their function (e.g., processing or data retention) is not required.
To address yield issues, some integrated circuits are designed to function as partial good chips. A partial good chip is an integrated circuit including one or more elements that are redundant of another element, wherein the redundant elements are not necessary for function of the integrated circuit chip, but operated in case of a defect or failure of a like element. For example, a design for a partial good chip can include ten processor cores, wherein two of the processor cores are redundant. Each of the processor cores can be located in a respective voltage island and be connected to through gating logic that allows an individual processor core to be ignored, bypassed, and/or avoided. Because two of the processor cores are not required for the integrated circuit to function as designed, a manufacturing process that produces the processor cores with less than a 100% yield is likely to produce chips with a sufficient number of good processor cores.
Integrated circuit chips combining voltage islands and redundant structures increase the time and complexity of chip design. Moreover, because verifying designs for integrated circuits can involve triple the effort used in designing the integrated circuits, verification of designs for integrated circuit chips having voltage-islanded redundant structures can involve an unpractical amount of time.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.